Biography|Patrick Collison — The Friday Night at the RDS When Croma Won

On the evening of 14 January 2005, President Mary McAleese stood in the RDS in Ballsbridge and named a sixteen-year-old from Castletroy College the Esat BT Young Scientist of the Year.

The exhibition had opened in the RDS Main Hall two days earlier. Judges had 480 shortlisted projects in front of them, drawn from more than a thousand entries, the highest total in the contest's 41 years.

Patrick Collison's board was titled CROMA: a new dialect of LISP.

He received a cheque for €3,000 and a Waterford Crystal trophy. Contemporary reports in the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner give that figure; later summaries that inflate it are not used here.

The same night he was booked to represent Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Moscow that September, where he took a second-place award.

The RDS campus sits at Merrion Road, Dublin 4. The Main Hall, completed in 1880 for the Society's agricultural shows, is the room the school parties still walk into every January.

A national science fair is an odd origin story for a payments company. It is also the one he kept pointing back to when Auctomatic sold three years later.

The pin is the hall, not a later office.

Photo: William Murphy, The RDS in Ballsbridge, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons